Paint.net


Paint.net is a freeware raster graphics editor program for Microsoft Windows, developed on the.NET Framework. Paint.net was originally created by Rick Brewster as a Washington State University student project, and has evolved from a simple replacement for the Microsoft Paint program into a program for editing mainly graphics, with support for plugins.

History

Paint.net originated as a computer science senior design project during spring 2004 at Washington State University. Version 1.0 consisted of 36,000 lines of code and was written in fifteen weeks. In contrast, version 3.35 has approximately 162,000 lines of code. The paint.net project continued over the summer and into the autumn 2004 semester for both the version 1.1 and 2.0 releases.
Development continues with one programmer who worked on previous versions of Paint.net while he was a student at WSU. As of May 2006 the program had been downloaded at least 2 million times, at a rate of about 180,000 per month.
Initially, Paint.net was released under a modified version of the MIT License, with the exclusion of the installer, text, and graphics. It was completely open-source, but because breaches of license, all resource files were released under a non-free Creative Commons license forbidding modification, and the installer was made closed-source. Version 3.36 was initially released as partial open-source, but Brewster later took down the source code, citing problems with plagiarism. In version 3.5, paint.net became proprietary software. Users are now prohibited from modifying it.
Starting with version 4.0.18, paint.net is published in two editions: A classic edition remains freeware, similar to all other versions since 3.5. Another edition, however, is published to Microsoft Store under a trialware license and is available to purchase for US$7. According to the developer, this was done to enable the users to contribute to the development with more convenience, even though the old avenue of donation was not closed.

Overview

Paint.net is primarily programmed in the C# programming language. Its native image format,.PDN, is a compressed representation of the application's internal object format, which preserves layering and other information.

Plugins

Paint.net supports plugins, which add image adjustments, effects, and support for additional file types. They can be programmed using any.NET Framework programming language, though they are most commonly written in C#. These are created by volunteer coders on the program's discussion board, the paint.net Forum. Though most are simply published via the discussion board, some have been included with a later release of the program. For instance, a DirectDraw Surface file type plugin, and an Ink Sketch and Soften Portrait effect were added to Paint.net in version 3.10.
Hundreds of plugins have been produced; such as Shape3D, which renders a 2D drawing into a 3D shape. Some plugins expand on the functionality that comes with Paint.net, such as Curves+ and Sharpen+, which extend the included tools Curves and Sharpen, respectively.
Examples of file type plugins include an Animated Cursor and Icon plugin and an Adobe Photoshop file format plugin. Several of these plugins are based on existing open source software, such as a raw image format plugin that uses dcraw and a PNG optimization plugin that uses OptiPNG.

Forks

paint-mono

Paint.net was created for Windows, and has no native support for any other system. With its previous open-source nature, the possibility for alternate versions was available. In May 2007, Miguel de Icaza officially started a porting project called paint-mono. This project had partially ported Paint.net 3.0 to Mono, an open-source implementation of the Common Language Infrastructure on which the.NET Framework is based. This allowed Paint.net to be run on Mono-supported platforms, such as Linux. This port is no longer maintained and has not been updated since March 2009.

Pinta

In 2010 developer Jonathan Pobst started a project called Pinta, describing it as a clone of Paint.net for Mono and Gtk#. Pinta reused the adjustments and effects code from Paint.net but otherwise is original code.

Releases

VersionRelease dateSignificant changes
1.0May 6, 2004Initial release.
1.1October 1, 2004Support for effect plugins.
2.0December 17, 2004Many new effects, adjustments, and tools.
2.5November 26, 2005Internationalization support; update manager; support for file type plugins.
2.6February 24, 2006Use of.NET Framework 2.0, full 64-bit support.
2.72August 31, 2006Last version to support Windows 2000.
3.0January 26, 2007This major release introduces a new multi-document interface, availability in 8 languages, a highly requested interactive gradient tool, four new effects, a user-definable color palette, lower disk space usage for scratch files, and a generally cleaner and improved user interface
3.05March 29, 2007Added a new effect; improved certain parts of the user interface.
3.10August 23, 2007Ink Sketch and Soften Portrait effects added; support for the DDS filetype.
3.20December 12, 2007Enhancements to the built-in effects, a re-organized Effects menu, a new and much easier system for effect plugin development, better error handling for plugins, and the ability to draw Fixed Ratio and Fixed Size selections with the Rectangle Select tool..
3.22January 12, 2008Adds a new Reduce Noise effect.
3.30April 10, 2008This release adds an Italian translation, a new "Fragment Blur" effect, and the ability to save PNG images at 8- and 24-bit color depths. For developers, the IndirectUI system has some new controls, some new constraint rules, and can now be used for file type plugins.
3.35June 7, 2008A new Posterize adjustment, a new Intersect selection mode, dramatically improved performance for selection editing.
3.5November 6, 2009Improved performance reliability, reducing memory usage, upgrading to the latest.NET Framework version, and refreshing the user interface for Aero and glass
3.5.2January 4, 2010Resolves some feature disparities in the Text tool between GDI and DirectWrite. It also improves overall performance, as well as the correctness and quality of the Move Selected Pixels tool, the Image->Resize function, and the Hue/Saturation adjustment.
3.5.5April 26, 2010Fixes a bug when saving 8-bit images, improves layer composition and Gaussian Blur performance, and is updated to support the new.NET Framework 4.0 in some cases. Dropped support of Windows XP without Service Pack 3, additional support for.NET 4.0.
3.5.11August 17, 2013Fixes the Gaussian Blur effect that was incorrectly calculating alpha values for non-opaque pixels. Effects Sharpen, Median, Fragment and Unfocus have seen an improved performance of 25%, 30%, 40% and 100% respectively. Also memory usage is reduced when many selection manipulation operations are in the history/undo stack. The built-in updater now supports upgrading to paint.net 4.0
4.0June 24, 20144.0 requires Windows 7 SP1 or newer, and uses.NET Framework 4.5.1 This complete rewrite contains a brand new, asynchronous, fully multithreaded rendering engine, antialiased selections, a redesigned user interface, soft brushes, and a new shapes tool. Most Tools now support "fine-grained history" and it can adjust the properties of what the user has drawn before committing to the layer.
4.0.6August 2, 2015Updated for Windows 10. Increases the maximum brush size to 2000. The shapes tool now allows custom shapes to be installed and used. IndirectUI-based effect plugins can now provide help text, accessible via the question mark button.
4.0.7December 30, 2015Updated for.NET Framework 4.6. Added Swedish translation. Title bar uses the Windows 10 accent color. Custom Shapes XAML now supports cardinal splines via PolyCurveSegment. Shapes tool rendering performance on CPUs with many cores.
4.0.10July 8, 2016Added "overscroll" to the editor.
4.0.20January 9, 2018Updated for.NET Framework 4.7.1. Dark Theme support added.
4.1September 5, 2018Several effects rewritten to use GPU. Copy-and-paste selections. Two new effects: Morphology and Turbulence. Increased maximum zoom level to 6400%. IndirectUI enhancements.
4.2July 13, 2019Added HEIF file format support, fixed performance with very large images, and upgraded and modernized the functionality of many existing file types
4.2.1August 7th, 2019Added JPEG XR file format support
4.2.2September 18th, 2019Can open AVIF files, improved DirectDraw Surface support and 4-bit saving for PNG/BMP/TIFF
4.2.5October 1st, 2019Added WebP file format support
4.2.6November 21st, 2019Added a "Native pointer input" setting if a "pointer" device is available.
4.2.7November 25th, 2019Fixed a crash at startup the stub for System.Runtime.dll not being updated, and 2) the rigid version binding policy that prevented the older version from working in its stead.
4.2.8December 3rd, 2019This small update fixes a few pressing bugs, particularly for touch and pen input.
4.2.9January 31st, 2020This update greatly improved performance and significantly reduced memory usage, added two new translations, and fixed a number of small issues.
4.2.10February 14th, 2020Fixed some important bugs, most notably with installations that directly use the MSI file for deployment.
4.2.11May 20th, 2020Adds XMP metadata support, 3 new translations, some UI improvements, and several bug fixes.